Scheer: U.S. Is Its Own Worst Enemy in Iraq (Time to Get Out)

http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-scheer17may17,0,6555141,print.column?coll=la-home-headlines

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To begin to understand the insurgency, the Bush neocons would have to concede that their adventure in nation-building has turned U.S.-occupied Iraq into a deeply alluring target for anti-American rage among Islamic fundamentalists. This Pandora's box once opened cannot be shut by shoving a few ex-Baathists into the new Baghdad government, as urged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her photo-op visit last weekend.

By all accounts, the disparate elements of the Iraqi insurgency do agree on one thing: their desire to drive the U.S. military out. Thus, the U.S. presence is the fuel for the conflagration it claims to be stamping out.

Yet instead of accepting that the occupation is the chief recruiting tool for both would-be martyrs and less-suicidal nationalist fighters, there is widespread bipartisan agreement in our government that the heavy-handed U.S. presence is the key to restoring order. Leaders of both parties have bought into the fantasy that the January elections proved that a stable, democratic Iraq that will be friendly to the U.S. is just around the corner.

As usual, they are wrong. Foreign jihadis will keep coming across Iraq's porous borders in search of a bloody martyrs' heaven, Sunni Iraqis will keep fighting for the wealth and power they believe is their birthright, and Shiite radicals such as cleric Muqtada Sadr, popular with Iraq's teeming poor, will continue to denounce the U.S. presence, as he did Monday in Najaf.

The answer is to leave the Iraqis to control their own affairs, rather than pretending to govern from half-empty legislative meetings in the locked-down Green Zone in Baghdad. The U.S. is now part of the problem, rather than the solution.

but now will have to do, bring our soldiers home.

:kick:

we should never have invaded a country illegally to begin with, and we should sure as hell be getting out, if we have any interest whatsoever in helping to restore order to Iraq.